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September 28, 2008

Disappointing performance

Both John McCain and Barack Obama did pretty well in Friday night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi. This translates to a victory for Obama because "pretty well" isn't going to do it for McCain. My gut tells me that a sizable number of voters will vote for Obama as a expression of their own innate goodness. Issues are not an issue. Picture them in eager anticipation of the worldwide approval which is sure to come when they elect America's first African-American president. Oh, it's not that Obama is African-American as much as it is that he's a lefty -- politically speaking. All Obama needed to do at the debate was to avoid making it uncomfortable for the establishment press to support him. Since the press is predisposed to support him, he only had to demonstrate that he could stick to the Democratic talking points.

If McCain wants to win this election, he has to demonstrate to enough voters that Obama can't be trusted. One place where McCain absolutely must do this is in the war on terror. During the debate McCain went after Obama on his disastrous judgment on the troop surge in Iraq, but he ultimately let him off the hook. Obama simply dismissed the gravity of those miscalculations by countering that the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do in the first place. For whatever reason, McCain was unwilling to challenge him on that. That unwillingness could cost him the election.

McCain voted for the invasion, so he should make it a point to explain why. He has said publicly and repeatedly that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, but with a campaign strategy that seeks to distance him from George Bush on all things, he has not been saying it lately. It's wise to distance himself on some things, but not all things. The war in Iraq is one issue where he should publicly side with Bush.

To the charge that he has sided with George Bush 90% of the time, McCain could agree and helpfully offer an example of a time that he did. He can point out that there have no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in seven years. He can say, yes he's with Bush on that. He can explain why we haven't been hit since 9/11 by reminding people that Osama bin Laden had put out the call for martyrs to go to Iraq for the glory of defeating the Great Satan. It's widely accepted now that al Qaeda was badly beaten there after the surge troops and the counterinsurgency strategy were in place.

But Friday night he gave Obama a pass and let him argue that his mistakes on the surge are inconsequential when compared to the crucial mistake of invading Iraq in the first place. McCain has to attack that. Obama was not right to oppose the war, but that was a small mistake. His opposition to the surge, though, was a huge mistake and would have been a catastrophe if the country had been forced to go along with him on it.

Making the case for the war in Iraq will be an uphill battle with a substantial block of voters. Iraq is no longer the crisis it once was, and the five-year steady diet of Democratic talking points on Iraq force fed to the American public by the establishment media has taken its toll. He won't convince everybody that he was right and Obama was wrong, but he can convince a lot of people that it was a good strategy in the war on terror, and one that he believed in it.

McCain should make his case even if he thinks nobody will believe him. Obama was dead wrong about the surge. There is no doubt about it. McCain should aggressively trumpet his conviction that Obama was as wrong in his opposition to the invasion as he was about the surge. There are voters who will listen.

Obama likes to say we can't afford another four years of Bush policies. McCain should remind everybody that there are some Bush policies that we ought to keep. One of them is winning the wars we get into. The change that Obama says we need is not something new. He would bring us back to the policies of Jimmie Carter, complete with a windfall profits tax on oil companies, economic malaise, and a naive and inept foreign policy.

John McCain can win this election but he won't do it by eschewing all things Bush. He robs himself of some of his more powerful arguments by refusing to admit that he agrees with Bush.